Alternative Imgur version for the main image
Previously I was using Samsung N150P (netbook) as my home server and it served me around 6 years. >> https://programming.dev/post/708584
Though after upgrading to Debian 13, additional 90 packages were installed just with the upgrade. I also had a little adventure with it :) >> https://programming.dev/post/708488
Anyway, this new mini PC I got is from 2016 and surprisingly it has 8GB DDR3 RAM (I’m rich now). It’s generally in good condition. Even though it’s Celeron N3000, this one doesn’t have hyperthreading so only 2 cores. Still it’s a real upgrade over Atom N450 CPU.
Since last year, I was planning to get a Raspberry Pi and moving from there. However thanks to AI overlords it got so expensive I had to bail from that fantasy. I got this for 40$ and with 8GB RAM I think it was a good deal.
I was already planning to change my home server to Alpine for a while but I just couldn’t touch a perfectly fine system because lazy. So this time I went with Alpine and I already love how small it is. I just installed a couple monitoring tools and packages like sudo along with Pi-hole so currently it has quite few packages.
Don’t worry though, I’m planning to use that RAM, with time. :)
It could be that I was using particularly shit SD cards, or putting too much continuous load on them, but I have killed a handful of them over the time I used them. I dunno, could be user error for sure.
I have never managed to kill an SSD though, so I trust them much more.
In my case, I had swap space on the SD card, and suspect that’s what killed it. After replacing the card and disabling swap, I haven’t had any problems for the last couple years
I’ve got a box I made with a air filter and 200mm fan on one end, then it blows through a “tunnel” that has a network switch and 4 Raspberry Pis inside, one runs Frigate with an AI hat, another runs home assistant, another is running my Pi Hole, another is basically a NAS with a 2TB external USB drive, and they do a whole bunch of other miscellaneous ad-hoc tasks. The clean airflow keeps them cool just sitting there with open PCBs and the normal little heat sinks, they’re all wired to the switch so only 1 ethernet cable comes out.
On the one hand, a single Core i3 PC could probably handle ALL the tasks easily enough, but… what about when Frigate goes weird? I don’t want my whole home DNS/DHCP and home automation to go with it. Same for everything else, and if one of the microSD cards goes bad (none have yet after over 1000 days of 24 hour continuous operation except during power outages) - that’s just one thing going bad, not EVERYTHING.
I must admit the 2TB external drive is cheap junk, and those things do “wear out” - even internal SSDs go bad over time, I’ve had it happen at work more than once within about 5 years of normal use. I try to get the better microSD cards for the Pis and so far they’re not having problems for me.
One thing you can look into if you like messing around with system configurations is partitioning your microSD with “immutable” partitions where any changes are written in RAM (yes, RAM heavy Pis are even more expensive than they used to be, but it all depends on your application…) I do this for my Pis that run around in the world and get their power cut off without warning - failures are so rare in the first place it’s hard to know if all the partition work is worth the effort, but so far I’ve never had a corrupt file system with the immutable partitions carefully configured, and I have had several before I started doing that - not failed SD cards, just corrupt filesystems that needed to be re-formatted.
Get a load of this cat flexing their wealth :D
The isolation of services makes some sense, but I found that there was plenty of single points of failure anyway (power, internet, router, pihole), so not worth worrying about a few more. And the reliability of the nuc has mostly given me peace of mind. I do have a separate nuc for a NAS, though.
I bought them a long time ago, and always refused to pay scalper prices. My Zero 2Ws were all $15, most of the others are Pi4 and Pi5 from before the RAM inflation.
Power is nice and stable in this arrangement, a bunch of the RasPi foundation supply bricks on a power strip mounted to the breeze-tunnel.
I’ve been a NUC fan since forever, but last year I had two NUCs that I bought in 2020 die within a month of each other, one had a power supply issue and I think the other one had a worn out SSD - it was working fine when I unplugged it, but when I plugged it back in 6 weeks later it wouldn’t boot.
Like I said, one old / low power NUC could do this, but when it dies far too much of our smart home goes dumb all at once.
Did you add the fs2ram stuff. Uses RAM for all the temp writes and stuff so SD card only deals with actual file storage access.
I tried some things like that, not sure which ones specifically. The ones I tried were very fiddly though.
They (fs2ram and similar) are annoyingly, frustratingly fiddly and not worth the effort IMO… until I got Claude to do the fiddly bits for me… It isn’t just the initial setup, it’s also the additional hoops you have to go through whenever you want to change something on the “protected” partition. Fiddly is the word for it, not hard, but time and brain-power consuming.
If you’re not doing a lot of writes, log2ram might be good enough and isn’t that hard to set up
Another thing LLM agents are good at is reading log files and giving you clues as to what just went sideways, when that includes a system restart it’s nice to be able to look back acrosss the logs of the past several cycles.
I mean, I think you have reason to trust SSDs more anyway. They’re just physically designed for more wear and tear than SD cards are, even if I’ve never destroyed an SD card myself I’m aware of their lack of resilience compared to SSDs.
And yeah, I always dropped the extra money for Samsung Pro SD cards, maybe that’s part of it, too.